Hostrocket Review

With its focus on dedicated and shared hosting plans, Hostrocket has been around since 1999 and is privately owned. They are headquartered in Clifton Park, New York with a customer base of more than 50,000 and have their own datacenter which allows them to provide their customers with increased uptime and reliability.

Since its inception, the company has seen exceptional and consistent growth, and claims to be entirely debt-free. Since it is not partially or wholly owned by investors, you can be sure that the company is here to stay for the years to come. There is a high level of profitability and positive cash flow, and in Hostrocket’s own words, they have achieved this without funds from outside investors or bank financing.

The company’s 10,000 sqft. datacenter is large enough to house thousands of servers and uses a 10 gigabit fiber that is securely connected to a nationwide network to ensure that your website will be up and running at all times without facing any downtime, unlike some of their competitors. And to ensure maximum bandwidth, all wiring is done with Cat5e ethernet wiring and the switches and routers are made by Cisco.

The company has a team of young, goal-oriented professionals who, according to Hostrocket, are dedicated to providing their customers with a high level of service at all times. Most of the Hostrocket reviews have generally been positive and in our own review, we will find out if the company delivers on its promises.

Customer Support

The first thing that customers want to know about before considering a hosting provider is their customer service, and sometimes, it becomes a major deciding factor. It is one of those factors that can really make or break a company. And certainly, if you are in a pinch, you should be able to call or contact someone from the company that is hosting you.

In this regard, Hostrocket has a dedicated support page which is refreshingly comprehensive. The page is divided into several sections, namely shared, reseller, dedicated server and reseller cloud. If that is not enough, they have a 24/7 customer support team besides an extensive knowledge base, and if you still have any questions, you can email the technical team.

Knowledge Base

Hostrocket offers an impressive knowledge base that offers helpful guides spread over different topics that long-time users will appreciate. The knowledgebase is divided into many sections such as cPanel, sales and billing, domain registration and DNS, email services and website development.

There is also an FAQ section that has a host of topics covering change of domain names, changing your PHP version and settings, website backups, general web security resources and transferring ownership.

Support Ticket/Telephone

Hostrocket does not have chat support (yet), which is surprising given their infrastructure, especially when smaller companies offer this service. But to their credit, the company offers two telephone numbers on their website (1.866.519.7079 and 1.518.371.3421) if the customers are unable to find answers to their queries in the knowledge base or the FAQ section.

Alternatively, customers can use the support ticket system if the answers are not in the knowledge base, with sections such as billing, affiliates, sales, abuse and technical support. You can state your query in detail and the support staff usually answers pretty quickly (within 1-3 hours).

Uptime

Upfront, Hostrocket gives you a 99.5% uptime guarantee, and state this categorically on their terms of service page and say that they and their affiliates are bound to these terms. They say that if you face issues such as your website facing downtime for an extended period, you can let them know by any given means, and they will review this with you and credit your account accordingly.

Hostrocket also features a page that shows the status of all their servers. Incredibly, at the time of this review, the servers went down twice. But let not that reflect on the overall credibility of the website, every website sees some downtime every now and then.

Key Features

These are the key features of Hostrocket:

One-Click Installs

You can have your website up and running in no time with Hostrocket’s one-click installs of the most popular software such as Joomla, Geeklog, Drupal, Mambo, MODx, Xoops, PyroCMS, ocPortal, Contaco and many more.

cPanel/WHM

cPanel is widely recognized as the leading website control interface and is known for managing and uploading web pages, protecting bandwidth and content, installing applications and much more. It has become the industry standard over the years. WHM is a control panel interface for servers and it makes it easy to integrate new web technologies, setup and modify customer accounts and create and apply hosting plans among other things.

RVSiteBuilder

Hostrocket supplies this incredible online site-building tool with its hosting and shared accounts. Website building has never been easier with its great features and easy to use steps. You can choose from a vast library of well-designed templates, or are free to create your own.

30-Day Money Back Guarantee

If you are unhappy with Hostrocket’s hosting for some reason or wish to close the account in the first 30 days, you can claim a refund on all the hosting fees paid. This does not include any domain registration payments or setup fees. Still, 30 days is a lot of time to gauge if you like the service or not.

24/7/365 Tech Support

Hostrocket offers multiple channels of support that are accessible at all times, and even let you reboot your server if a problem arises.

Hardware Replacement

Pricing Plans

For a small company, Hostrocket offers a ton of plans for its customers. There is web, SSD shared, reseller VPS and dedicated hosting, but there is also colocation and domain registration services. We will look at some of their most popular pricing plans.

Web Hosting

Hostrocket offers you the best in infrastructure and service and offers you 4 great plans:

Monthly Plan: This plan is best for those who are just starting out. Starting at $11.98 per month, you get unlimited bandwidth, disk space and websites, unlimited emails, sub-domains and databases, free site backups via cPanel and a 30-day money back guarantee.

Semi-Annual Plan: This plan is best for those who own large or multiple websites. Starting at $8.99 per month, you get unlimited bandwidth, disk space and websites, unlimited emails, sub-domains and databases, free site backups via cPanel and a 30-day money back guarantee.

Annual Plan: Starting at $7.99 per month, you get unlimited bandwidth, disk space and websites, unlimited emails, sub-domains and databases, free site backups via cPanel and a 30-day money back guarantee. You also get free setup and an additional 3 months (of the plan).

Biennial Plan: Starting at $5.99 per month, you get unlimited bandwidth, disk space and websites, unlimited emails, sub-domains and databases, free site backups via cPanel and a 30-day money back guarantee. You also get free setup and an additional 6 months(of the plan). This plan is available on sale as of now.

They also offer add-on services such as dedicated IP addresses for $2 per month, 256-bit SSL certificates ($99 for 2 years, on sale), domain registrations for $20 a year and remote backup for $5 (per backup).

They also offer add-on services such as dedicated IP addresses for $2 per month, 256-bit SSL certificates ($99 for 2 years, on sale), remote backup for $5 (per backup) and domain registrations for $20 a year.

You also get centOS or Ubuntu Linux, 1 hour of free hardware replacement, 15TB Tier 1 bandwidth for websites that require large amounts of data transfer and web space and dedicated tech support.

SSD Shared Hosting

Considered one of the best ways to host your business or personal website, Hostrocket’s SSH shared hosting packages allow you to do this under one account. They have 3 plans.

They also offer add-on services such as dedicated IP addresses for $2 per month, 256-bit SSL certificates ($99 for 2 years, on sale), remote backup for $5 (per backup) and domain registrations for $20 a year.

Security Features

CageFS via CloudLinux

This is a virtualized system that prevents users from viewing sensitive information and seeing each other. It also prevents information disclosure and privilege escalation attacks. The customers don’t need to change their scripts. The users only have access to safe files, and they cannot see configuration files such as Apache config files. Users also do not have any way to detect the presence of other users on the server.

ModSecurity

This is an open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF) and is also often called the “Swiss army knife” of WAFs. It provides protection from a range of attacks against web applications and also allows for real-time analysis, logging and HTTP traffic monitoring.

OSSEC

OSSEC actively monitors all aspects of your system, including file integrity, process monitoring, rootcheck and log monitoring and lets you know in case of an attack via emails and alert logs. This can be applied to a host of operating systems such as VMware ESXi, Solaris, Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD, AIX and HP-UX.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Overall honest advertising, the company is transparent about what they are offering.

Free online website builder that is rich in features and easy to use.

An intuitive control panel that is stable and reliable and easy to use even by novices.

Great customer support; all of their plans come with 24/7 technical support that is accessible through phone, online ticketing and their knowledge base.

Multiple app integrations which are easy to install and set up.

Fast and consistent page loads.

Cons

High setup fees; in some cases, it’s as high as $50.

Hostrocket charges for SSL certificates, IP address and domain registrations, whereas a lot of other companies offer these services for free.

Some customers may not approve the lack of live chat support.

Lack of Hostrocket coupons.

Conclusion

Hostrocket is a small company and not part of a large conglomerate, which goes in their favor because they can offer their customers better quality customer support compared with other companies. If you want to get the full advantage of Hostrocket packages, you will want to go in for a long-term package, because of the fact that they run their own datacenter (among the several other advantages we’ve listed above), and hence, the chances that you will receive great service are high.